U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL agency the EPA is making good on promises to drive down server power consumption, releasing a first draft of its proposals for an Energy Star badge for the bad old electricity hogs.

Ever since some genius asked ‘what’s happened to the ice caps?’ there has been a push to reduce computer power consumption. And with the desktop already having done the logo thing many years ago, it’s now the server’s turn to lose weight.

The draft zeroes in on power supplies, what happens in idle mode, benchmarking and thermals. Respondents have a month to provide feedback, which isn’t a long time for a government-backed agency draft, but then the energy situation is deemed pretty mission-critical by influential folks like Al Gore.

Of course, energy consumption in servers is a ticklish thing for those of a philosophical turn of mind. Ideally, we’d like our children to have light and warmth, and servers do indeed hoover up the juice like a Cadillac Escalade. But then they also help cut other forms of power. For example, you don’t take the Escalade to Tesco because you can buy your stuff over the internet. And if you start messing with server power consumption, what will be the impact of potential hits on performance?

Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Depends on your personality. A lot of green types tend to see the world in a miserablist way and want to ban anything that uses power. Some of us think ‘sod that’, get on with our lives and our only concession is to tell the family to turn the bloody lights off when they leave the room.

Having a badge for servers is probably A Good Thing that gets rid of the worst abuses but the price of power is already making energy efficiency a big metric and benchmarks are likely to be a thorny issue. µ